Ironclad Scores $8 Million Series A

SAN FRANCISCO — Ironclad has raised $8 million in new Series A funding and has unveiled a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that turns contracts into code, radically streamlining the way corporations create, store, and leverage contracts as intelligence assets. The Series A funding was led by Accel and brings Ironclad’s total funding to over $11 million since the company’s founding two years ago. As part of the funding round, Accel’s Steve Loughlin will join Ironclad’s Board of Directors.

Ironclad aims to transform contract processes for legal, sales, and operations teams by automating workflows and approvals. The Ironclad system also identifies key terms and entities, turning “contracts into code” and allowing users to search, tag, and manage their contracts as they would other pieces of business data. Today, Ironclad powers contracts workflows at hundreds of companies including GoFundMe, Gusto, and HotelTonight.

“We’re focused on turning every contract into an intelligence asset,” explains Jason Boehmig, CEO and co-founder. “Contracts are a business’s DNA: the blueprint for sales, marketing, IP. Until now, no one has been able to sequence the DNA, to map the genome and control the blueprints. That’s what Ironclad is powering for our customers.”

Ironclad’s intelligent platform turns contracts into templates that anyone—marketers, salespeople, human resource professionals—can use to start a contract and see it through to completion. The system then layers intelligence on top of this data to create an entirely new way for companies to manage their contracts. Using a blend of artificial intelligence, smart context, and integrations with other platforms, Ironclad can automatically make suggestions, notice errors, and properly route contracts through the approval process.

Once signed, Ironclad’s system automatically captures, tags, and organizes a contract’s key elements and attributes. This information can then be automatically woven into a range of workflow systems such as a company’s ERP or financial systems, through integrations or by using Ironclad’s public API. For businesses in highly regulated industries, Ironclad’s archival systems also provides a consistent format for automatically storing and archiving contracts for easy retrieval—a labor-intensive, error-prone task, often resulting in lost files and data.

“Contract management is an antiquated and time consuming process that is ripe for innovation,” said Steve Loughlin, a partner at Accel. “We invested in Ironclad because of its experienced leadership team, sophisticated technology platform and intuitive design. Jason and his team are poised to change how businesses get work done with their single, secure platform that will save all parties time while producing more accurate documents.”

Boehmig conceived of the idea for Ironclad as a corporate attorney at Fenwick & West. Together with co-founder and CTO Cai GoGwilt, a former Palantir Technologies software engineer, the two built a prototype of the Ironclad platform while at Y Combinator.